Emblem is the debut collection from Lucy Mercer, winner of the inaugural White Review Poet’s Prize. The book, published Prototype in 2022, ‘contemplates the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior.’ Mercer’s poems have previously been published widely in magazines and anthologies.
In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato – a witness to a lonely time – the poems are carried forward by a non-linear dream logic of metaphor and similitude, speaking pictures who remain silent and a focus on an adjacent imaginal world. As well as reusing images from Alciato’s emblem book, the poems fixate on alternating relations between text and image that blur into relations between mind and body, child and mother, red and green, past and present, public and private, the living and the dead (Prototype).
Emblem was designed by Traven T. Croves (Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister) and typeset in Mercure (Abyme, 2021).
